The Best Games for Every System

We'll probably never run out of things to say about video games. Which games are interesting, which games are maddening, which games are provocative, which games are boring. That's all well and good, but sometimes, you just want to know which games are best.

We hear you. That's why we publish 'The Bests', a collection of regularly updated posts that round up the 12 best games for each major platform.

Our imagined audience for The Bests is a person who just bought a new gaming console or device, and wants to know which games they should check out first. (That makes some of the lists—particularly the PC list—much more difficult to maintain, which is one reason we made a separate post of the best classic PC games.) Or maybe they're someone who wants to get a gift for someone else, and needs some recommendations to help make the best choice. Or heck, maybe they're just someone who likes debating whether Destiny is better than Titanfall.

We decided early on to cap the lists at 12 entries apiece, and to list the games in no particular order. That means that whenever we add a game, we must remove one. We think that approach keeps the lists nice and focused, though the trade-off is that the better a list gets, the tougher it becomes for us to decide which games to clear out for new entries.

Every time a new game comes out that deserves consideration for The Bests, we debate it among our team. Those debates are often fierce, always enjoyable, and the resulting decisions are necessarily the product of compromise. That said, we think that each list more or less reflects Kotaku's favourite games on each platform, and the ones we think you should play.

Here are our up-to-date lists of the best games for every major gaming system.